An involuntary armyTHE DRAFT is back, and this time it is more unfair than ever. The Pentagon's lingo for it is a "stop-loss order," but it is a form of conscription that requires soldiers to serve longer than the tours of duty to which they have committed. The Pentagon is stooping to this tactic as the only way to fill its units being deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. If the military does not quickly find a better way to meet its personnel needs, the occupation of Iraq could be as damaging to morale and retention rates in the "volunteer army" as the Vietnam War was in the conscription Army.
The draft that ended in 1973 at least tried, with limited success, to spread the burden of military service equally across society. The new draft, which is a result of bad judgments by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, piles additional hazardous duty on the shoulders of men and women who have already fulfilled the terms they signed up for. Recently the Pentagon announced a major expansion of stop-loss orders, which could extend soldiers' service by more than a year. In other steps to fill the breach, the Pentagon has sent 3,600 US soldiers to Iraq from South Korea as well as a special desert warfare unit that until now had been kept stateside for training other soldiers. All of this is happening because Rumsfeld and his aides refused to accept the advice of those, like former Army chief of staff Eric Shinseki, who warned that the occupation of Iraq would require a much larger force than Rumsfeld was planning on. Another lesson from Iraq is that it is a mistake for the United States to take on such missions without first doing the diplomacy necessary to secure troop commitments from its allies, especially France and Germany, which have substantial forces. A unilateral foreign policy combined with a stripped-down US military is a prescription for the personnel shortages the Pentagon faces. This has left many, including a bipartisan majority in the Senate, calling for an expansion of the Army, which is justified, at least for the near term. Senator John Kerry has a proposal to pay for it: scaling back the administration's still unproven missile defense system and other weapons programs. Lawrence Korb, who was assistant secretary of defense under President Reagan and is now with the Center for American Progress, recommended a major force expansion in an article in Foreign Affairs this spring. In addition, he called for more active-duty soldiers -- as opposed to reservists -- to be trained as military police and civil affairs specialists, since it is clear that nation-building will be a prime task for the Army.
Without such changes, Korb fears, morale and reenlistment rates will plummet. To keep the Army truly volunteer, it has to become larger and better organized. © Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.
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